THE JUNE ISSUE OF THE NEW CRITERION arrived last week, and I can’t tell you just how really, truly . . . ambivalent I am about that. It looks, once again, like a wonderful issue. It includes a review by Mark Steyn of The Producers, and a long essay on journal-writing by Joseph Epstein. There’s a diary of the New York music scene by Jay Nordlinger and a comparison of British and American obituary-writing by James Bowman. There’s a review by John Derbyshire of a book on probability theory, and a review of a biography, by the critic Michael J. Lewis, of the architect Frank Furness. There are, in short, more than a half dozen articles, totaling probably twenty thousand words, by several of the liveliest and most intelligent magazine writers I know of, on subjects of interest to me personally and professionally, offering the prospect of hours and hours of pleasure and edification, and I don’t mean any offense when I say that right at the moment, as things now stand, I can’t imagine anything more unnecessary. I don’t blame the New Criterion. I don’t have time for petty finger-pointing. I’ve got other stuff to do. I still haven’t read last Sunday’s New York Times. It’s sitting in a basket in my dining room, all twelve pounds of it, emitting subtle subsonic vibrations that sail silently around the house and reach me in whatever room I happen to be in. “I’m still waiting,” it says. “Don’t you want to read about the newly discovered ruins in Majorca, in the Travel section? The article couldn’t be more than 1,500 words! And so well written!” And I do want to read about Majorca, I do, I’m dying to go to Majorca someday, but first, of course, I’ve fallen behind in my other reading. The New York Review of Books, for example, and People magazine: For professional reasons I like to keep up with both publications. And several issues worth of each are stacked on my coffee table in the family room. They’re much more dated than last Sunday’s New York Times. So if I’m to go about my reading in a systematic manner, which I intend to do, and clear up this tremendous backlog of unread stuff that seems to have accumulated, I should do so in chronological order, which means barreling through these back issues of the New York Review and People before turning to last Sunday’s Times. Correct? But it’s more complicated than that. A newspaper has greater immediacy than a biweekly like the New York Review, and is weightier than a gossip rag like People, so according to the complex equation I’ve worked out to solve precisely these questions of what I should read and when, a four-day-old unread Sunday New York Times should be read before a six-week-old New York Review, and definitely before an issue of People from last February, even if Nicole Kidman is on the cover, which she usually is. Fine. Perfectly logical. But where, then, do I place the Atlantic? After an “off” period lasting roughly three-quarters of a century, the Atlantic has remade itself into a magazine that’s a joy to read. I know because I’ve read at least three articles in the last three issues and there are several more I’m planning to read, which is why I have them stacked on an end table in my office. Now that I look at it, I see it’s the same stack that contains last month’s New Criterion. I’ll have to read that before I start on the June issue. The New Yorker’s really good, too, by the way. It comes out every week. Every single week. One further complication, needless to say, is the Internet. It used to be that a fellow could just neglect to read the Sunday Times and leave it at that. Now, thanks to the Internet, which can move mountains of good reading to your desktop at the speed of light, I feel compelled not to read the London Sunday Telegraph or the Guardian, both of which are must reading. And then there are the online magazines, the ones found in cyberspace exclusively. A couple of gardening sites, for example, offer articles that are indispensable to a beginning gardener like me, and if I don’t know that I’m not reading them I feel as though I’m slacking off. And Slate, too: a witty online magazine from which I’ve accumulated literally dozens of articles I’m planning to read, on subjects ranging from sexual politics to one called “A Time-Saving Tip for Reading the New York Times,” which I hope to read after I finish reading the Times. I store these articles on my computer. They’re retrievable at the touch of a button, saving me huge amounts of table-top space—yet another advantage of the new technology. And they said computers would destroy the pleasure of reading!
